New Scientist Space - Cosmology

The gap between the emissions reductions needed for 1.5°C and countries' pledges has closed by up to 15 per cent - but Climate Action Tracker finds cuts are still far short of what is needed

Modern spiders are known to be devoted parents, and ancient spiders trapped in 99-million-year-old amber seem to have cared for their young too

Sharon Peacock leads a group of researchers who started sequencing the genome of the coronavirus in March 2020 and identified the rise of the delta variant in the UK

Analysis of fossilised faeces from rock hyraxes shows that the extremely dry area of Wadi Sana in Yemen was once a lush oasis

Prospects for South America's biggest wild cat are likely to get worse in the short term unless the Brazilian government strengthens protections against deforestation for timber and cattle farming

SpaceX’s Inspiration4 launch, planned for 15 September, will mark the first time a flight into orbit has been crewed exclusively by people who are not professional astronauts

Mixing materials extracted from their own blood and urine with native Martian soil could let astronauts produce a type of concrete for building a colony

Male rodents in species with shorter breeding seasons tend to have larger testes, probably because the time pressure increases sperm competition between males

NASA’s planned successor to the Hubble Space Telescope

Changes in the position of the polar jet stream around the Arctic may have caused past famines in Europe, and global warming could lead to even bigger changes from around the 2060s

An analysis of DNA from 515 centenarians has identified rare genetic variants that might help explain how they reached their hundredth birthday

Sixteen young cows learned quickly how to urinate in a latrine, allowing their urine to be processed without producing greenhouse gases emissions

Global greenhouse gas emissions from food production are 37 per cent of the total, and animal-based food production emits twice as much as plant-based food production

Stars that have eaten their planets aren't promising places to look for alien life, and now there is a technique that can help quickly identify such stars from their chemistry

Army ants steal more food during raids on other insect nests by temporarily storing their plunder nearby, a computer simulation and fieldwork in the Amazon suggest

Tiny bean-shaped crustaceans called ostracods, known as sea fireflies, release glowing blue mucus to threaten predators, but some males evolved to use this to attract females

Greening parts of cities is widely promoted as boosting biodiversity, health and well-being, and now researchers have found that improving even tiny green spaces leads to big increases in biodiversity

El Salvador is the first country to adopt the cryptocurrency bitcoin as legal tender, but other nations may follow suit

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic

A study looking at the use of encryption to keep the contents of an email private has found that the technology is rarely used, despite being available for decades